Anti-pokies campaigners slam PM

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has confirmed she will break her deal with independent Andrew Wilkie to introduce mandatory pre-commitment technology for poker machines by 2014 and pass the legislation by May.

Instead the technology will be trialled in the ACT from next year and a decision deferred until 2016.

Mr Wilkie told reporters in Hobart on Saturday he was forced to withdraw support for the Gillard minority government.

"I think a lot of Australians are feeling let down by the prime minister," Mr Wilkie said.

"She has an extraordinary ability to get the numbers and to get things through the parliament when she really wants to, and this would have been no exception."

Chris Matthews, whose daughter Katherine suicided because of her gambling addiction told reporters in Adelaide she was angry.

"I wouldn't trust Julia Gillard to make me a cup of coffee," she said.

Her daughter had 40 cents left in her purse after putting $4000 into a poker machine the night she committed suicide in 2006.

She was thousands of dollars in debt and had maxed out credit cards.

Ms Matthews said mandatory pre-commitment technology would have saved her daughter's life because it gives gamblers the opportunity to keep track of what they were losing and walk away.

"I want something to be done, I don't want any one else to go through what our family has," she said.

Fellow anti-gambling campaigner Senator Nick Xenophon said he doubted the Gillard government had ever had its heart in the proposed gambling reforms.

"This is a breach of faith," Senator Xenophon told AAP.

"The only thing Julia Gillard is pre-committed to is staying in power."

The Australian Greens have flagged introducing a private member's bill for an alternative plan of $1 bet limits.

Greens senator Richard Di Natale told reporters in Melbourne, the backdown was a sad day for families shattered by problem gambling.

"It's a spineless announcement and represents a cave in to vested interests," he said.

"It could set back the cause of pokie machine reform for decades to come."

He said the $1 bet limit policy had wider support in parliament and opposition leader Tony Abbott had not ruled out supporting the idea.

Anti-gambling campaigner Tim Costello said the full roll out of the pokies reforms hung on a "wing and a prayer."

"We are trusting a future parliament where there won't be a Wilkie with the balance of power," he told ABC TV.

"It's something that disturbs me."

GetUp National Director Simon Sheikh said lives will be lost without real pokies reforms.

"What's been announced today is a smokescreen, its reform in name only," he said.

"One in five suicide patients seen by The Alfred Hospital's emergency department is addicted to gambling. There's no doubt that today, Clubs Australia has blood on its hands."

Opposition gambling spokesman Kevin Andrews said the Gillard government could not be trusted.

"They are prepared to do anything, say anything and promise anything to cling to power," Mr Andrews said in a statement.

A Clubs Australia boss Anthony Ball said the organisation would not be "dumping" their ongoing campaign against the reforms until they examined the details of the legislation.

"Clubs Australia will in coming days work through the detail of the Prime Minister's gambling policy," he said.

Uniting Care national director Lin Hatfield Dodds said the policy u-turn was "disappointing"

"The pokie industry needs to be on notice that we will get there in the end," she said in a statement.